Plenary Lectures Winners 2023
Plenary Lectures 2023 - Cell Winner
Professor Wendy Bickmore
Plenary Lectures 2023 - Bidder Winner
Professor Elizabeth Brainerd
Plenary Lectures 2023 - Woolhouse Winner
Wendy Bickmore is Director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit, at the University of Edinburgh. Her undergraduate degree is in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford and she then completed a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Edinburgh. Following a postdoc in human genetics, Wendy started her independent research group as a fellow of the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine. She is fascinated by the three-dimensional organization of the human genome in cells and how that influences genome function in health and disease. Her current research explores how the non-coding genome regulates gene expression including how distant enhancers communicate with their target gene promoters. Wendy is a Fellow of: the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Academy of Medical Sciences and is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. She was awarded a CBE for services to science and to women in science
Elizabeth L. Brainerd is the Robert P. Brown Professor of Biology at Brown University. She received her doctorate from Harvard University in 1991 studying the functional morphology of fishes with Prof. Karel Liem, and then was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows for postdoctoral work in biomechanics with Prof. Tom McMahon. She was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1994 to 2005 and then Full Professor at Brown University. She has broad research interests in the biomechanics and evolution of movement in vertebrate animals, including work on all major groups of extant vertebrates and feeding, breathing, and locomotor behaviors. At Brown she has worked with Prof. Stephen Gatesy and other colleagues and students to develop X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM), which is a set of methods for visualizing and quantifying the movements of 3D bones in 3D space. XROMM has been adopted by many research groups around the world and is yielding new insights into musculoskeletal structure, function, and evolution.
Lisa Ainsworth is the Research Leader of the USDA ARS Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit and Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her BS in Biology at UCLA and PhD in Crop Sciences from UIUC. Her research addresses crop responses to global atmospheric change and potential solutions to mitigate climate change through agriculture. She has long studied photosynthetic responses of plants to climate change, and her research is broadly integrative, from genetic to agronomic scales. In 2011, she was awarded the President’s Medal from the SEB. In 2019, she was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences and was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.